'Good girls don’t protest': report exposes attacks on Sudan's female activists

On her way to a meeting with a UN official to discuss sexual violence in Sudan, Nagwa was detained by plain-clothed policemen who blindfolded her and held her in a cell for eight hours.

Nagwa, a women’s rights activist, thinks she was silenced because the authorities feared she would blow the whistle on the time when security agents raped her and placed her under house arrest for her work with Nuba Mountain communities displaced by ongoing conflict.

Nagwa’s story is one of many outlined in a report released today by Human Rights Watch that documents the abuse experienced by female activists at the hands of Sudan’s security forces.

In more than 85 interviews researchers found that almost all the women had experienced some form of gender-based violence perpetrated by the authorities as a result of their work.

“Generally in Sudan, the government is targeting women more than men,” Fatima, a women’s rights activist in Khartoum, said in response to the report. “A lot of laws and a lot of legislation have been drafted since this government came, [targeting] women, [restricting their] dress, and even mobility and work.”

The report also details frequent violations such as rape and sexual violence, psychological and verbal abuse, with many interviewees adding they had also been subjected to arbitrary detention. Fahima Hashim has a similar story. She ran a women’s centre in Khartoum for 17 years before security forces shut it down in 2014. “You know you are really crossing the line talking about politics [and] sexual violence’,” security forces allegedly told her.

The activists said there have also been multiple instances where the country’s media had been used to leverage social stigma against women involved in activism, citing news articles on planned protests to discourage potential participants.

Shadia Abdelmonim, who has been campaigning for women’s rights for more than 20 years, said state-controlled newspapers have also referred to female civil society activists as “lesbians and prostitutes” for taking part in demonstrations.

“Once they told me, ‘Take off your dress and we’ll make a film [and] post it on Facebook and all over the media, and put your name in the newspaper with the pictures’,” Abdelmonim says. “I told them, ‘Just do it, because the people know me! … They know that I am not like what you are saying’.”